Category: Series
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Episode 69 – Rent Strike Series Part 2
This is episode two of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. On August 30, corporate landlord Ballast Investments won the auction for Veritas Investments’ delinquent debt and will take over 75 Veritas-owned…
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Episode 68 – Book Review Roundtable: Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning
Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is defined by…
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Episode 66 – Book Review Roundtable: How Cities Can Transform Democracy
We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for democracy? This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established certainties of…
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Episode 65 – Book Review Roundtable: Migrants and Machine Politics
As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local…
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Episode 64 – In Conversation with Vera Smirnova (The Urban Lives of Property Series II)
In this second part of the series Urban Lives of Property, Hanna and Markus talk to Vera Smirnova, a human and political geographer to discuss property and territory from a Russian perspective. Smirnova’s genealogical account moves from the Czarist period to this day, illuminating also the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Smirnova offers a…
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Episode 62 – In Conversation with Nick Blomley (The Urban Lives of Property Series I)
This podcast series explores the “life of property” in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city. Within the social sciences and critical…
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Episode 60 – On Peripheralisation
How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement…
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Episode 56 – Urbanization: A Contested Concept (Urban Concepts Series)
Urbanization has become central in recent political discourses, as well as a contested concept in experts’ spheres. This podcast of the Urban Political delves into the phenomenon of urbanization and traces back how the idea of “expanding cities” is causing disagreement in urban studies and leading researchers to raise questions that have haunted the discipline…
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Episode 50 – Community and Commons (Urban Concepts)
In this first episode of the Urban Concept series, Louis Volont (MIT, Boston) and Thijs Lijster (University of Groningen) discuss with Talja Blokland (Humboldt University, Berlin) the concepts of community and commons and consider implications for urban research and action. The key argument revolves around the idea of community as a practice, not an owning,…
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Episode 44 – Decolonize/Decenter: Planning in the South
‘How can academic research be of service to envisioning alternative planning agendas that reflect the realities of the so-called Global South?’ is the central question that our guest host Inhji Jon stresses in this episode. Since Western-centric planning approaches imposes norms on places and times where they are inappropriate, we need to explore the possibilities…
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Episode 31 – Multiple Crises and Radical Urban Research (AfterCorona #13)
Starting off from her latest agenda-setting article “What does it mean to be a radical urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar today?” published earlier this year in the relaunch issue of the journal CITY – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. It was published before the pandemic shock and the current wave of Black Lives…
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Episode 30 – The Revolutionary Movements in Algeria and Lebanon (AfterCorona #12)
This episode delves deep into the ongoing revolutionary movements in Algeria and Lebanon. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Rana Sukarieh provide us with a rich and inspiring account of developments, offering social-economic background to the events of the last two years, outlining the main contours of the political struggles in the two countries and drawing comparative insights.…
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Episode 29 – Genealogies of Liveability (AfterCorona #11)
Nina Stener Jørgensen and Maroš Krivý offer us the broader picture of the contemporary urbanist discourse of liveability and Jan Gehl’s rise to prominence. In a tour de force, they walk us through Gehl’s original work within the Danish welfare state of the 1960s, his indebtedness to the contributions of his wife Ingrid, his rise…
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Episode 28 – Urban Commonwealth (AfterCorona #10)
On the basis of the book The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth, we discuss with Margaret Kohn her resuscitation of the early 20th century solidarist ideas and the links to the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city. We challenge her on the question of scale and the role of the state in…
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Episode 27 – Teaching and Learning in Urban Research (AfterCorona #9)
Robin Chang and Meg Holden discuss how the Covid-19 situation has disrupted teaching and learning practices in urban research, deepening existing and exposing new inequalities. They consider in particular the short and long term implications of on-going restrictions for experiential learning, what this means for urban research methods, drawing on concepts like discomfort and positing a notion of…
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Episode 26 – Spatialities of Shock (AfterCorona #8)
Reflecting on how shocks are applied as tools to further political agendas, Creighton Connolly, S. Harris Ali, and Roger Keil consider the implications for racialized inequalities and the Global South-North divide. Two months after the first conversation with out guests, at a moment when the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, Creighton, Harris, and Roger…
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Episode 25 – Migration and Labour Struggles (AfterCorona #7)
How is the pandemic affecting conditions of labour and migrant workers? How are Unions and other organisations reacting? In this wide-ranging and forensic discussion with Michelle Buckley (Toronto), Rajan Pandey (Bangalore) and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Mohali) tell us about on-going struggles around mobility and labour in Canada and India. We hear about how the Indian state…
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Episode 24 – Dark Clouds over Informal Settlements II: Responses to the Pandemic (AfterCorona #6)
Reporting from Kenya and South Africa with Jethron Ayumba Akallah and Marie Huchzermeyer provide us with a detailed account of the coronavirus-pandemic in their context, the conditions within the informal settlements, the state approaches and the responses by civic organizations. Marie and Jethron share their perspective on the opportunities and threats of this situation and…